Novelists like George Eliot, Thackeray, and Trollope make it easy for the pedantic reader to work out a monthly calendar of events in their major fictions. In Middlemarch, for example, we can set down the following chronology for the novel’s main events:

    1829 early summer: Dorothea and Casaubon meet
  1829 September: Dorothea and Casaubon marry
  1829 Christmas: Dorothea and Casaubon in Rome
  1830 May: Peter Featherstone dies
  1830 July–August: Lydgate and Rosamond marry
  1831 March: Casaubon dies
  1832 March: Raffles dies
  1832 May: Will and Dorothea marry
  1832 June: the Reform Bill1

Vanity Fair, although it covers a much longer tract of history (1813–32) than Middlemarch (1828–32), is meticulous about calendar time-markings, particularly in its early, tight-knit sections covering the period from summer 1813 to summer 1815. Thackeray’s narrative opens with ostentatious chronological exactitude: ‘While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June …’ In the next hundred pages we learn that Rebecca is to stay ten days with the Sedleys, that the year coyly given as the ‘teens’ of the century must be 1813, and the ‘sunshiny morning in June’ is the fifteenth of that month.2 Thackeray’s chronometer continues its exact calendric beat throughout the subsequent narrative. As did George Eliot for Middlemarch, Trollope drew up a detailed monthly time-line for The Way We Live Now.3 George Eliot made fine changes to her schedule. And it has been argued that Trollope used an actual 1872 calendar to get even greater precision for his layout of The Way We Live Now.4

Dickens is much less precise about monthly and seasonal references, particularly in his early novels.5 Anyone attempting to draw up a calendric schedule for the central events of Martin Chuzzlewit will run into some perplexing and thought-provoking anomalies. These anomalies witness less to any carelessness on Dickens’s part, than to his Shakespearian confidence in making the elements do whatever it is that the current mood and dramatic needs of his narrative require them to do. Dickens is no slave to the calendar.

To demonstrate this, one may start with Martin’s break with Pecksniff. We are told the hero leaves on ‘a dark winter’s morning’ (Chapter 12). There is supporting evidence as to the wintriness in Dickens’s description of the bleak skies, cold rain, and mud that accompanies Martin’s tumbril-like journey by cart from Salisbury to London. In Chapter 14, preparatory to his departure for the New World, Martin has his farewell meeting with Mary Graham in St James’s Park. Dickens gives another wintry picture of the dawn assignation between the lovers:

He was up before daybreak, and came upon the Park with the morning, which was clad in the least engaging of the three hundred and sixty-five dresses in the wardrobe of the year. It was raw, damp, dark, and dismal; the clouds were as muddy as the ground; and the short perspective of every street and avenue, was closed up by the mist as by a filthy curtain.

‘Fine weather indeed,’ Martin bitterly soliloquised. (Ch. 14)

The theme of funereal winter darkness is reiterated in the description of England, as Martin and Mark set sail for America (Ch. 15):

A dark and dreary night; people nestling in their beds or circling late about the fire; Want, colder than Charity, shivering at the street corners; church-towers humming with the faint vibration of their own tongues, but newly resting from the ghostly preachment ‘One!’ The earth covered with a sable pall as for the burial of yesterday; the clumps of dark trees, its giant plumes of funeral feathers, waving sadly to and fro: all hushed, all noiseless, and in deep repose, save the swift clouds that skim across the moon, and the cautious wind, as, creeping after them upon the ground, it stops to listen, and goes rustling on, and stops again, and follows, like a savage on the trail.

Dickens does not give any precise monthly reference, but it would seem self-evident from the bitter cold that Martin’s embarkation occurs at deep midwinter, January or early February at the latest.

At one early point in New York, Martin tells the obnoxious Jefferson Brick that it is ‘five weeks’ since he left England. He and Mark cool their heels (although there are no precise references to seasonal temperature) for a few weeks more in the big city before setting off for Eden. No date reference is given. Meanwhile, back in Britain, old Anthony Chuzzlewit in Chapter 18 complains at ‘What a cold spring it is!’. Presumably a couple of months have passed and we are now to understand that it is early April. The same spring season is subsequently described as ‘lovely’, as Mr Pecksniff and Jonas return from Anthony’s funeral. The day of that ceremony is ‘fine and warm’ – late April, presumably. Chapter 20 (in which this description occurs) ends Number 8 in the novel’s original serialization, and Number 9 switches to America where, at exactly the same moment, it is implied, Mark and Martin are setting out on their journey to the interior. When the young men arrive in Eden (i.e. Cairo, Illinois, at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers), it seems to be high summer: ‘A fetid vapour, hot and sickening as the breath of an oven, rose up from the earth, and hung on everything around’ (Ch. 23). Illinois does not get baking hot until June and July.

Back in England, in what is now evidently midsummer, Pecksniff makes his wooer’s assault on Mary. Dickens expatiates on the seasonal warmth and fecundity which matches Pecksniff’s own bounding libido:

Pecksniff’s subsequent failure to win Mary’s heart leads to Tom Pinch’s dismissal, the crisis coming ‘one sultry afternoon, about a week after Miss Charity’s departure for London’ (Ch. 31). Banished forever from his patron’s favour, Tom also makes his way to London, by stagecoach. The panorama of pre-railway rural England that accompanies his trip lingers lovingly on the summery landscape which Tom sees from his seat on the driver’s box:

Yoho, among the gathering shades; making of no account the deep reflections of the trees, but scampering on through light and darkness, all the same, as if the light of London fifty miles away, were quite enough to travel by, and some to spare. Yoho, beside the village green, where cricket-players linger yet, and every little indentation made in the fresh grass by bat or wicket, ball or player’s foot, sheds out its perfume on the night. (Ch. 36)

Meanwhile, Martin and Mark undergo their regeneration in Eden. No precise time references are given, other than that after some weeks Martin falls ill, and it is thereafter ‘many weeks’ before he recovers from his ‘long and lingering illness’ sufficiently ‘to move about with the help of a stick and Mark’s arm’ (Ch. 33). After they have resolved to leave Eden it is a further ‘three crawling weeks’ before the steamboat arrives to pick up the reluctant immigrants. On the voyage back along the river, it is clearly high summer: the first person Martin and Mark see on board the paddle-boat is ‘a faint gentleman sitting on a low camp-stool … under the shade of a large green cotton umbrella’ (Ch. 34). There is little delay, apparently, in their embarkation from New York, on the Screw again. The description of their arrival back in England in Chapter 35 is euphoric, with weather to match. They left at gloomy midnight; they return at joyous midday:

It was mid-day, and high water in the English port for which the Screw was bound, when, borne in gallantly upon the fulness of the tide, she let go her anchor in the river.

Bright as the scene was; fresh and full of motion; airy, free, and sparkling; it was nothing to the life and exultation in the breasts of the two travellers, at sight of the old churches, roofs, and darkened chimney stacks of Home. (Ch. 35)

The narrative goes on to inform us: ‘A year had passed, since those same spires and roofs had faded from their eyes.’ We feel, of course, that a year must have passed, for all this travelling, new experience, chronic illness, and moral regeneration to have taken place (apart from anything else, Martin on his return is clearly recovered in health). Adding up all the casual references to ‘months’, ‘weeks’, and ‘days’, a year might even seem too short. Primitive calculation, however, reveals that this twelvemonth duration means that Martin and Mark must return in winter, not summer. Nor, on the other hand, can it be eighteen months (which might bring them to the next summer), since that would create a missing year in the convergent Pinch – Chuzzlewit sector of the narrative.

From the lack of any clear date-markers, we are given to understand that the travellers’ return from the New World is coincidental with Tom Pinch’s arrival in London, his reunion with Westlock and Ruth, and his installation with Mr Fips. Tom is well established in his new employment at the Temple while it is still summer. In Chapter 40, for instance, he is described going down to the London docks at seven in the morning, with Ruth, to enjoy ‘the summer air’.

The fact that these two strands of the narrative (the Martin strand and the Tom strand) have merged in summer (of whatever year it may be) is clinched by the great summer storm of Chapter 42. The prelude to this cataclysm, which will bring the melodrama to the boil, is described as coming at the climax of a heatwave:

On the night of the storm Mark and Martin come to the Blue Dragon. This picks up a comment made by Mark immediately on returning, as they sit in the tavern by the docks: ‘My opinion is, sir … that what we’ve got to do, is to travel straight to the Dragon’ (Ch. 35).

This, then is the problem: some six hectic months have passed in Tom Pinch’s life, bringing him from February to August. ‘A year’ has passed in Mark and Martin’s life bringing them from February to the same August. Clearly, if Dickens had been precise about his chronology, Martin and Mark would have missed the great summer storm by six months, arriving back in gloomy, wintry January or February following. Nor could their stay in America be abbreviated to half-a-year, given all the events and long experiences it had to contain. ‘There are some happy creeturs’, Mrs Gamp observes to Mr Mould, ‘as time runs back’ards with’ (Ch. 25). Martin Chuzzlewit would seem to be just such a happy creetur.

Dickens eludes any charge of error by a kind of prophylactic vagueness – he never names a month, only seasons. But the missing six months in his hero’s career also relates to the Great Inimitable’s masterful way with background.6 Clearly, for the purposes of mood, Dickens wanted black, depressive winter for Martin’s departure for the New World. It matched the low point his career had reached. As clearly, Dickens wanted high summer for his hero’s return. In its turn, the summer season chimed with Martin’s spiritual rebirth and his happier relationship with life, society, and his friends and sweetheart. Coincidentally, one may note that Martin’s trip to America matches Dickens’s exactly: the novelist left Liverpool on 2 January 1842, and returned in June the same year.

Notes

1. George Eliot’s schedule for these events is to be found, with some alterations and later changes of mind, in her ‘Quarry for Middlemarch’, A.T. Kitchel (ed.) (Los Angeles, 1950), 45–6. As Kitchel’s transcription shows it was, for instance, Eliot’s original intention to have Dorothea marry as early as 1827.

2. I examine this topic in ‘The Handling of Time in Vanity Fair’, Anglia, 89 (1971), 349–56.

3. See P.D. Edwards, ‘Trollope’s Chronology in The Way We Live Now’, Notes and Queries, 214 (1969), 214–16.

4. See Bert Hornback, ‘Anthony Trollope and the Calendar of 1872: The Chronology of The Way We Live Now’, Notes and Queries, 208 (1963), 454–8. Peter Edwards’s article in N&Q, cited above, specifically refutes Hornback’s thesis.

5. Dickens is also vague about historical dating. In Martin Chuzzlewit (London, 1985, Unwin Critical Library), 35, Sylvère Monod notes the contradiction of the world of coaching around Salisbury and the steam-driven vessels on which Martin and Mark travel to and in America.

6. Monod makes the point that errors and awkwardness in the narrative construction of Martin Chuzzlewit are at least partly to be attributed to the novelist’s artistic inexperience (see p. 141). Monod cites as examples of loose threads in the story such things as Pecksniff’s loss of all his fortune before Tigg has any reasonable chance of acquiring it (p. 81).